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Delightfully Ridiculous

Paleo

See, here’s the thing, I’ve finished the show and still I haven’t quite managed to have a moment to breathe at all. The idea of fiddling with a week and a half worth of photos was just too too much to bear. So tonight you get a recipe for Pulled Pork.
The easiest (and, incidentally, Paleo-friendly) recipe I’ve ever seen.

Paleo Pulled Pork
Recipe by my friend Susan

Ingredients:
2kg pork shoulder. If you can, buy it on the bone for extra flavour.
3T of smoked paprika.
3T of salt
1T of dry mustard
1.5T of ground cumin

Cooking:
Combine all the spices and then massage into the pork shoulder.
Leave it in the fridge to marinate – if you can do it overnight that’s ideal, but at least for an hour or two.

Preheat your oven to 150 degrees then put the pork shoulder into the oven for 6 hours in a covered dish.

After 20 minutes, leave it to rest for 20ish mins. Then, with a fiendish amount of glee, get two forks and start shredding the meat. Do your best not to eat it all at this point. It smells and tastes divine.

There are some good things that come from this Paleo diet. Besides weight loss and not feeling disgusting after meals. But sometimes you come up with delicious treats that you can share with your friends who are gluten free, or have chronic fatigue syndrome, or who have recently found out that they are allergic to PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING.And these? these are so good that I will probably make them on and off for years. They are so good I would eat them if I did not care about gluten or grains or dairy or anything else. They are so good I emailed them to all my people before I even perfected the recipe.

Because I kind of did make this recipe up. Not from scratch, it is sort of an amalgam of three or four different recipes, and a bit of trial and error on my part. But you should try them! They are delicious.

I essentially gave up on Paleo just before ChristmasI kept the basic principles as much as possible but there were just too many sweets, so many refined carbohydrates, a lot of smooth peanut butter on whole grain toast. I started feeling bloated after almost every meal. My jeans started getting just a little bit tight. But mainly, I felt unhealthy after I was finished with a meal.

In a pan on medium/high heat fry the bacon and onion for 5 minutes or until the onion is tender

Add the sage, paprika, salt, and pepper and cook for a further two minutes. Remove pan from the heat and leave to cool.

In a large bowl combine the bacon mixture, egg, and minced lamb. Mix well.

Roll the lamb mixture into balls and place in a tray lined with baking paper. Bake in the oven for 30-40 minutes until well cooked.

To make the sauce, place the tomatoes, basil, garlic, salt, and pepper in a medium sized pan** and simmer for 5 minutes. Add the spring onion and simmer for a further minute.

Add the cooked meatballs and simmer for a further 10 minutes. Serve with a sprig of basil.Note: if you are not on the Paleo diet I’m sure this would be a good spaghetti and meatballs recipe. I would just double the tomatoes, basil, and garlic for the sauce.

* Adapted just a smidge from the free pdf book “Recipes for the 21st Century Hunter Gatherer” by Nikki Young** I just use the pan the bacon mixture was cooked in, so you get all the excess spices and whatnot

Today marks six weeks of Paleo for Craig and I. How’d we do? I think we did pretty well. We didn’t make it through 100% of the time, but I’m pretty certain we averaged over 80%, probably closer to 90%. I coped a little better with office lunches than my sandwich-fan husband, but that was always expected.

My smallest pair of jeans, the jeans I couldn’t fit 6 weeks ago? are now the only pair of jeans I own which fit properly.

So what now?

Much to Craig’s chagrin, I don’t want to jump back on the refined carbohydrate bandwagon. But I miss … soy sauce. And tortillas. And chickpeas.(I really don’t miss dairy, or bread)

I think the lasting impact of Paleo is more about eating whole foods.I read more labels than ever before. I avoid emulsifiers and stabilisers and ridiculous additives. Unusually, I’m eating more organic than … ever. It just seems to be making sense to me.

Oh and the coworker who said he would waste us all? Didn’t make it a week. Victory!

Three days in and my Dinosaur Diet is going swimmingly.No cheating at all. I mean, food-wise. Last night I was out and had wine. But I did so much better than the co-workers I was out with. I am totally going to win this damn challenge.

Preheat the oven to 180c/350f.Mix all the oil, chilli, garlic, and lemon juice together. Slice the chicken breast, lay in a greased oven pan and pour over the sauce, making sure to cover it all.Bake for 30-40 minutes.Serve over a “salad” of baby spinach and top with toasted slivered almonds.

– if I had thought in advance I would’ve added some red capsicum and paleo-mayonnaise. Eh. It was still really good.

I am terrible when challenged. My competitive streak comes out and … I find it hard to resist.I have to prove I can do … pretty much whatever it may be.

This time I am taking part in an office-wide diet challenge. Paleo.

One of my lovely coworkers has been eating Paleo with her rowing club for 5 weeks now and has convinced slightly less than two-handfuls of other coworkers to undertake the same challenge. It’s not based on losing weight or gaining muscle or anything like that. It’s just … eating weird.

Perhaps weird is the wrong word.

According to that font of all knowledge, Wikipedia, Paelo is

known as the Paleolithic diet (abbreviated paleo diet or paleodiet), also popularly referred to as the caveman diet, Stone Age diet and hunter-gatherer diet, is a nutritional plan based on the presumed ancient diet of wild plants and animals that various human species habitually consumed during the Paleolithic era—a period of about 2.5 million years duration that ended around 10,000 years ago with the development of agriculture. In common usage, such terms as the “Paleolithic diet” also refer to the actual ancestral human diet.Centered on commonly available modern foods, the “contemporary” Paleolithic diet consists mainly of grass-fed pasture raised meats, fish, vegetables, fruit, roots, and nuts, and excludes grains, legumes, dairy products, salt, refined sugar, and processed oils

Maybe it’s a little weird.

Essentially it seems like a stricter version of the Atkins diet? Which would, normally, have turned me off the whole thing. But in the weeks before and since the gauntlet was laid down I have found out that 3 different people-who-blog and 2 different people-I-actually-know have been secretly eating Paleo and loving it.

Even the original coworker, the coersive one*, the genesis of all of this is signing herself up. She is finishing her rowing 6 week challenge and then heading straight into the office challenge.

We gauge accomplishment not by losing weight or gaining muscle but on a points based system. Everybody starts the day with 30 points and then points are gained or lost by eating paleo food or not, by sleeping 8 hours, by exercising, by drinking water or alcohol, and by taking fish-oil capsules.

In essence, the main points are: x No grains. This includes bread, rice, pasta, corn, oatmeal (also any gluten-free pseudo-grains)x No sugar of any kind, real or artificial x No dairy. This includes cheese, yogurt and milk (natural clarified butter is allowed for cooking)x No legumes. This includes beans of all kinds, lentils and peanutsx No preservatives, processed or packaged foods (as much as is practical – look for ones without sugar or soy or dairy)

I have even managed to convince Craig to go along with this hare-brained scheme. I don’t remember HOW exactly I managed to do it. But I did. Perhaps with the promise of bacon and eggs for breakfast.

Yesterday I brought home a paleo recipe book in which I had flagged the recipes I thought sounded good. Miracle upon miracle, he liked them all too.

AND! Because this is so outside the realm of our usual fare this weekend I am going to get my organisation on and plan out the meals for the week and the food we need to buy and all that mishigas.I can’t wait.

I’ll let you know how it goes!

I have to admit I am a little worried. Not so much about the refined sugar and the dairy, I’ve given up sugar already, and I don’t eat much dairy to begin with, but the carbohydrates! I’ll miss bread and pasta and rice. Also the fake sugars – Craig and I drink unhealthy amounts of diet soda. I think cutting that out will be hardest of all. But probably be the best for us.If it goes really well, I might even share some of the recipes.Only time will tell.

* Actually, I blame the coworker who said he would totally waste [us] all. HE I MUST BEAT.